Fault detection and localization in dynamic software applications requiring user inputs and persistent states

ABSTRACT

The present invention provides a system, computer program product and a computer implemented method for prioritizing code fragments based on the use of a software oracle and on a correlation between the executed code fragments and the output they produce. Also described is a computer-implemented method generates additional user inputs based on execution information associated with path constraints and based on information from the oracle. Advantageously, the embodiment is useful in a test generation tool that generated many similar inputs when a failure-inducing input is found, in order to enhance fault localization. Further, described is a computer-implemented flow for extending the existing idea of concolic testing to applications that interact with persistent state.

STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH

Not Applicable

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention generally relates to the field of programming and more particularly to how to find errors and faults in software applications.

DESCRIPTION OF RELATED ART

Web applications are typically written in a combination of several programming languages (e.g., JavaScript on the client side, and PHP with embedded SQL commands on the server side), and generate structured output in the form of dynamically generated HTML pages that may refer to additional scripts to be executed. Since the application is built using a complex mixture of different languages, programmers may inadvertently make mistakes and introduce faults in the applications, resulting in web application crashes and malformed dynamically-generated HTML pages that can seriously impact usability.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention overcomes many problems associated with automatic fault detection and localization in dynamic web applications. A system, computer program product, and a computer implemented method is described for prioritizing code fragments based on the use of a software oracle and on a correlation between the executed code fragments and their execution characteristics. Also described is a computer-implemented method that generates additional user inputs based on execution information associated with path constraints and based on information from the oracle. Advantageously, the embodiment is useful in a test generation tool that generated many similar inputs when a failure-inducing input is found in order to enhance fault localization. Further, described is a computer-implemented flow for extending the existing idea of concolic testing to applications that interact with persistent state.

The present invention leverages two existing techniques—combined concrete and symbolic execution, and the Tarantula algorithm for fault localization—to create a uniquely powerful method for finding and localizing faults. The present invention extends the combined concrete and symbolic execution to the domain of dynamic web applications by automatically simulating user interaction. The method automatically discovers inputs required to exercise paths through a program, thus overcoming the limitation of many existing fault localization techniques that a test suite be available upfront. Shown is how the effectiveness of Tarantula can be significantly improved by utilizing a correlation between executed statements and their execution characteristics, in combination with an oracle or that detects where errors occur in the execution characteristics. The present invention is implemented in Apollo, a tool for testing PHP applications, using an HTML validator as our oracle. When applied to a number of open-source PHP applications, Apollo found, and precisely localized, a significant number of faults.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The subject matter, which is regarded as the invention, is particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed in the claims at the conclusion of the specification. The foregoing and other features and also the advantages of the invention will be apparent from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.

FIG. 1 is an example PHP web application broken into four parts a, b, c, and d.

FIG. 2 is a example HTML produced by the script part d of FIG. 1 along with output mapping constructed during execution and part of the output of WDG Validator on the HTML.

FIG. 3 is example pseudo-code of the present invention.

FIGS. 4-6 are example flow diagrams of a computer-implemented method for localizing faults in an application of the present invention.

FIG. 7 is a table of suspiciousness rating for lines in section d of the PHP script of FIG. 1 according to the present invention.

FIG. 8 is a table of characteristics of subject programs of the present invention.

FIG. 9 is a table of Experimental results for test generation runs of the present invention.

FIG. 10 is a table of Average percentage of program a developer would need to inspect for location the failures using the present invention.

FIG. 11 is a block diagram of a computer system useful for implementing the software steps of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

It should be understood that these embodiments are only examples of the many advantageous uses of the innovative teachings herein. In general, statements made in the specification of the present application do not necessarily limit any of the various claimed inventions. Moreover, some statements may apply to some inventive features but not to others. In general, unless otherwise indicated, singular elements may be in the plural and vice versa with no loss of generality. In the drawing like numerals, refer to like parts through several views.

Overview of Approach

In our previous work [3], the technique of concolic (combined concrete and symbolic) execution [4, 7, 8, 19, 22] was adapted to web applications written in PHP. In this approach, the application is first executed on an empty input, and a path condition is recorded that reflects the control flow predicates in the application that have been executed. By changing one of the predicates in the path condition, and solving the resulting condition, additional inputs can be obtained. Execution of the program on these inputs will result in additional control flow paths being exercised. This process is repeated until either there is sufficient coverage of the statements in the application or until the time budget is exhausted. For each execution, a determination is made if an execution error occurs, or if the generated HTML page is malformed, using an HTML validator as an oracle. This technique has been implemented in a tool called Apollo (version 1.0), and in previous experiments on 4 open-source PHP applications, Apollo 1.0 found a total of 214 failures [3].

The coverage achieved by Apollo 1.0 was limited, since Apollo 1.0 ignored changes to the state of the environment by the executed scripts. That is, each script was executed from a single initial environment state (usually a populated database). However, the desired execution characteristics of a PHP application are often only achieved by a series of interactions between the user and the server (e.g., a minimum of five inputs are needed from opening Amazon to buying a book). In the present invention concolic testing is enhanced by supporting automatic dynamic simulation of user interactions, and implement it in a new version of our tool, Apollo 2.0. Apollo 2.0 records the environment state (database, sessions, cookies) after executing each script, analyzes the output of the script to detect the possible user options that are available, and restores the environment state before executing a new script based on a detected user option.

More importantly, the present invention determines where in the source code changes need to be made in order to fix these failures. This task is commonly referred to as fault localization, and has been studied extensively in the literature (see, e.g., [5, 11-13, 18, 25]). In the present invention the Tarantula fault localization technique by Jones et al. [11,12] is combined with concolic execution in order to perform fully automated failure detection and localization for web applications written in PHP. The Tarantula technique predicts for each statement, how suspicious it is in causing the error. This is calculated from the percentage of passing tests that execute the statement and the percentage of failing tests that execute the statement. From this, a suspiciousness rating is computed for each executed statement. Programmers are encouraged to examine the statements in order of decreasing suspiciousness, and this has been demonstrated to be quite effective in experiments with the Siemens suite [10] of versions of small C programs into which artificial faults have been seeded [11].

The use of concolic execution to obtain passing and failing runs overcomes the limitation of Tarantula and many other existing fault localization techniques that a test suite with passing and failing runs be available up-front. Furthermore, the fact that PHP applications generate output in a format (HTML) that can be validated using an oracle (an HTML validator) enables us to enhance the effectiveness of fault localization. This is accomplished by maintaining, during program execution, an output mapping from statements in the program to the fragments of output they produce. This mapping, when combined with the report of the oracle that indicates what parts of the program's output are incorrect, provides an additional source of information about the possible location of the fault, and is used to fine-tune the suspiciousness ratings provided by Tarantula.

The contributions of the present invention are as follows:

-   -   1. Demonstration that the Tarantula technique, which was         previously only evaluated on small programs from the Siemens         suite with artificially seeded faults [11, 12], is effective at         localizing real faults in commonly used PHP applications.     -   2. Presentation of an approach for fault localization that         leverages concolic execution and the Tarantula fault         localization method. Contrary to most previous methods, ours         does not require the availability of a test suite.     -   3. Implementation of the technique in Apollo 2.0, a fully         automated tool for finding faults in PHP applications. This         included the design of a new automated technique for the         simulation of user input and tracking the usage of persistent         state. An experimental evaluation using 6 PHP applications         demonstrates that this significantly increased coverage for 6         interactive PHP applications.     -   4. Apollo 2.0 has been used to localize 49 faults in 3 of the         PHP applications and compared the effectiveness of: (i)         Tarantula, (ii) a fault localization method that only uses the         output mapping, and (iii) a technique that enhances Tarantula         using the output mapping. Discovered was that (iii)         significantly outperforms (i) and (ii).

Context: PHP and Web Applications

PHP is widely used for implementing Web applications, in part due to its rich library support for network interaction, HTTP processing and database access. A typical PHP web application is a client-server application in which data and control flows interactively between a server that runs PHP scripts and a client, which is usually a web browser. The PHP scripts that run on the server generate HTML that includes forms to invoke other PHP scripts, passing them a combination of user input and constant values taken from the generated HTML.

This section briefly reviews the PHP scripting language, and discusses the kinds of failures that may occur during the execution of a PHP application, focusing on those aspects of PHP that differ from mainstream languages.

The PHP Scripting Language

PHP is object-oriented, in the sense that it has classes, interfaces, and dynamically dispatched methods with syntax and semantics similar to that of Java. PHP also has features of scripting languages, such as dynamic typing, and an evalconstruct that interprets and executes a string value that was computed at run-time as a code fragment. For example, the following code fragment:

$code=“$X=3;”; $x=7; eval($code); echo $x;

prints the value 3 (names of PHP variables start with the $ character). Other examples of the dynamic nature of PHP are a predicate that checks whether a variable has been defined, and class and function definitions that are statements that may occur anywhere.

The code in FIGS. 1( b), 1(c) and 1(d) illustrates the flavor of PHP. Note first of all that the code is an ad-hoc mixture of PHP statements and HTML fragments. The PHP code is delimited by <?php and ?> tokens. The use of HTML in the middle of PHP indicates that HTML is generated as if it were in a print statement. The require statements resemble the C #include directive in the sense that it includes the code from another source file. However, the C version is a pre-processor directive with a constant argument, whereas the PHP version is an ordinary statement in which the file name is computed at runtime. Observe that the dirname function—which returns the directory component of a filename—is used in the require statements, as an example of including a file whose name is computed at run-time. There are many similar cases where run-time values are used, e.g., switch labels need not be constant. This degree of flexibility is prized by PHP developers for enabling rapid application prototyping and development. However, the flexibility can make the overall structure of program hard to discern and it can make programs prone to code quality problems.

Failures in PHP Programs

In one embodiment, the present invention provides a technique that targets two types of failures that may occur during the execution of PHP applications and that can be automatically detected:

-   -   Execution failures are caused by missing included files,         incorrect MySQL queries, and uncaught exceptions. Such failures         are easily identified as the PHP interpreter generates an error         message and halts execution. Less serious execution failures,         such as those caused by the use of deprecated language         constructs produce obtrusive error messages but do not halt         execution.     -   HTML failures involve situations in which the generated HTML         page is not syntactically correct according to an HTML         validator. This may result in pages being rendered incorrectly         in a browser, it may cause portability problems, and the         resulting pages may render slower when browsers attempt to         compensate for the malformedness.

Fault Localization

Detecting failures only demonstrates that a fault exists; the next step is to find the location of the fault that causes each failure. There are at least two pieces of information that might help:

-   -   1. For HTML failures, validators provide locations in the HTML         file that have problems, and one could correlate malformed HTML         fragments with the portions of the scripts that produced them.     -   2. For both kinds of failures, one could look at runs that do         not exhibit the error, and record what set of statements such         runs execute. Comparing that set of statements with the set of         statements executed by the failing run could provide clues as to         the fault location. The extensive literature on fault         localization algorithms that exploit such information is         discussed in the section “Related Work”.

PHP Example

FIG. 1 shows an example of a PHP application that is designed to illustrate the particular complexities of finding and localizing faults in PHP web applications. In particular, the figure shows: an index.php top-level script that contains static HTML in FIG. 1( a), a generic login script login.php in FIG. 1( c), and a skeleton of a data display script view.php in FIG. 1( d). The two PHP scripts rely on a shared include file constants.php that defines some standard constants, which is shown in FIG. 1( b).

These fragments are part of the client-server work flow in a Web application: the user first sees the index.php page of FIG. 1( a) and enters credentials. The user-input credentials are processed by the script in FIG. 1( c), which generates a response page that allows the user to enter further input—a topic—that in turn generates further processing by the script in FIG. 1( d). Note that the user name and password that are entered by the user during the execution of login.php are stored in special locations $_SESSION[$userTag] and $_SESSION[$pwTag], respectively. Moreover, if the user is the administrator, this fact is recorded similarly, in $_SESSION[$typeTag]. These locations illustrate how PHP handles session state, which is data that persists from one page to another, typically for a particular interaction by a particular user. Thus, the updates to _SESSION in FIG. 1( c) will be seen by the code in FIG. 1( d) when the user follows the link to view.php in the HTML page that is returned by login.php. The view.php script uses this session information to verify the username/password in line 5.

The example program contains an error in the HTML produced for the administrative details: the H2 tag that is opened on line 21 of FIG. 1( d) is not closed. While this fault itself is trivial, finding it and localizing its cause is not. Assume that testing starts (as an ordinary user would) by entering credentials to the script in FIG. 1( c). A tester must then discover that setting $user to the value ‘admin’ results in the selection of a different branch that records the user type ‘admin’ in the session state (see lines 20-22 in login.php). After that, a tester would have to enter a topic in the form generated by the login script, and would then proceed to FIG. 1(d) with the appropriate session state, which will finally generate HTML exhibiting the fault as is shown in FIG. 2( a). Thus, finding the fault requires a careful selection of inputs to a series of interactive scripts, and tracking updates to session state during the execution of these scripts.

The next step is to determine the cause of the malformed HTML. Consider the two sources of information suggested in the section “Fault Localization”:

-   -   The validator produces the output shown in FIG. 2( c) for this         fault, indicating that lines 5 and 6 in the malformed HTML of         FIG. 2( a) are associated with the HTML failure. These lines         correspond to the 12 heading and the following /BODY tags,         respectively. By correlating this information with the output         mapping shown in FIG. 2( b), lines 21 and 27 can be determined         in view.php produced these lines of output.     -   The second source of information is obtained by comparing the         statements executed in passing and failing runs. The HTML         failure only occurs when $type is equal to ‘admin’, and the         difference between passing and failing runs therefore consists         of all code that is guarded by the two conditionals on lines 11         and 20 in view.php. Consequently, it may be concluded that the         statements on lines 12, 14, and 21 are suspect.

Neither of these estimates is precise, since the fault is clearly in the printing of the H2 line itself (line 21). Combining, however, the results of the validator and the sets of statements. Specifically, observing that the printing of /BODY on line 27 in view.php occurs in both passing and failing executions, and is therefore unlikely to be the location of the fault. Furthermore, observing that lines 12 and 14, each of which is only executed in one of the executions, is not associated with the failure according to the information received from the oracle or code-validator. Therefore, it can be concluded that the fault is most closely associated with line 21 in view.php.

Concolic Execution in the Presence of Interactive User Input

The technique of the present invention for finding failures in PHP applications is a variation on concolic (combined concrete and symbolic) execution [4, 7, 8, 19, 22], a well-established test generation technique. The basic idea behind this technique is to execute an application on some initial (e.g., empty or randomly chosen) input, and then on additional inputs obtained by solving constraints derived from exercised control flow paths. Failures that occur during these executions are reported to the user.

In our previous paper [3], described is how this technique can be adapted to the domain of dynamic web applications written in PHP. The resulting Apollo 2.0 tool takes into account language constructs that are specific to PHP, uses an oracle to validate the output, and supports database interaction. However, prior art solutions relied on a manual solution for the challenging problem of interactive user input already described in the section “PHP and Web Application”, applications typically generate HTML pages that contain user-interface features such as buttons that—when selected by the user—result in the execution of additional PHP scripts. Modeling such user input is important, because coverage of the application will typically remain very low otherwise. In our previous paper [3], manually performed program transformation was used that translates interactive user input into additional script parameters. This manual step has several limitations:

-   -   It was performed only once before the analysis, and thus did not         take into account user input options that are created         dynamically by the web application.     -   More importantly, while Apollo 1.0 was able to execute         additional parts of the program, it did so without any knowledge         of parameters that are transferred from one executable component         to the next by persisting them in the environment, or sending         them as part of the call.

The present invention, replaces this manual step with an automatic method that (i) tracks changes to the state of the environment (i.e., session state, cookies, and the database) and (ii) performs an “on the fly” analysis of the HTML output produced by PHP scripts to determine what user options it contains, with their associated PHP scripts. By determining the state of the environment as it exists when an HTML page is produced, the environment in which additional scripts are executed as a result of user interaction is determined.

This is important because a script is much more likely to perform complex execution characteristics when executed in the correct context (environment). For example, if the web application does not record in the environment that a user is logged in, most scripts will present only vanilla information and terminate quickly (e.g., when the condition in line 5 of FIG. 1( d) is false). The new automated approach has increased coverage and the number of faults found, and it is within the true scope and spirit of the present invention that it could be utilized in other tools as well (e.g., in the context of the work by Wassermann et al. [22], who use concolic execution to find SQL injection vulnerabilities in PHP applications).

Algorithm

FIG. 3 shows pseudo-code for the failure detection algorithm, which extends the algorithm of Apollo 1.0 [3] by tracking the state of the environment, and automatically discovering additional scripts based on an analysis of available user options. As an overview, FIG. 3 illustrates how the solve auxiliary function uses the constraint solver to find an input satisfying the path constraint, or returns ⊥ if no satisfying input exists. The auxiliary functions restoreState and getCurrentState create a given environment state, or load the current state of the environment respectively. The analyzeOutput auxiliary function performs an analysis of the output to extract possible transitions from the current environment state. The output of the algorithm is a set of bug reports, each reports a failure and the set of tests exposing that failure.

More specifically, in FIG. 3, the inputs to the algorithm are: a program

composed of any number of executable components (PHP scripts), the initial state of the environment before executing any component (e.g., database), a set of executable components reachable from the initial state C, and an output oracle O. The output of the algorithm is a set of bug reports B for the program

according to O. Each bug report contains the identifying information about the failure (message, and generating program part), and the set of tests exposing the failure.

The algorithm uses a queue of tests. Each test contains the program component to execute, a path constraint which is a conjunction of conditions on the program's input parameters, and the environment state before the execution. The queue is initialized with one test for each of the components executable from the initial state, and the empty path constraint (lines 3-5). The algorithm uses a constraint solver to find a concrete input that satisfies a path constraint from the selected test (lines 7-9). The algorithm restores the environment state (line 11), then executes the program component concretely on the input and checks if failures occurred (lines 12-14). Any detected failure is merged into the corresponding bug report (lines 15-16). Next, the program is executed symbolically on the same input (line 17). The result of symbolic execution is a path constraint,

_(i=l) ^(n)c_(i), that is fulfilled if the given path is executed (here, the path constraint reflects the path that was just executed). The algorithm then creates new test inputs by solving modified versions of the path constraint (lines 18-21) as follows. For each prefix of the path constraint, the algorithm negates the last conjunct (line 19). A solution, if it exists, to such an alternative path constraint corresponds to an input that will execute the program along a prefix of the original execution path, and then take the opposite branch. Finally, the algorithm analyzes the output to find new transitions from the new environment state (line 22). Each transition is expressed as a pair of path constraints and an executable component. The algorithm then adds new tests for each transition that was not explored before (line 23-27).

Algorithm Example

Illustrated now is the algorithm of FIG. 3 using the example application of FIG. 1. The inputs to the algorithm are:

is the code from FIG. 1, the initial state of the environment is empty, C is the script in FIG. 1 (c), and O is the WDG HTML validator. (For more information see http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/)The algorithm begins on lines 3-5 by initializing the work queue with one item: the script of FIG. 1( a) with an empty path constraint and an empty initial environment.

iteration 1. The first iteration of the outer loop (lines 6-27)

removes that item from the queue (line 7), uses an empty input to satisfy the empty path constraint (line 9), restores the empty initial state (line 11), and executes the script (line 12).

No failures are observed, so the next few lines (line 13-16) do nothing. The call to executeSymbolic on line 17 returns an empty path constraint, so the function analyzeOutput on line 22 is executed next, and returns one user option; (login.php, Ø,Ø) for executing login.php with no input, and the empty state. This test is added to the queue (line 27).

iteration 2-5. The next iteration of the top-level loop dequeues the new work item, and executes login.php with empty input, and empty state. No failures are found. The call to executeSymbolic in line 17 returns a path constraint user≠admin

user≠reg, indicating that the call to check_password on line 8 in FIG. 1( c) returned false. For simplicity, the details of this function has been omitted because it is understood by those of average skill in the programming art. It compares user and password to some constrants ‘admin’ and ‘reg’.

Given this, the loop at lines 18-21 will generate several new work items for the same script with the following path constraints user≠admin

user=reg, and user=admin which are obtained by negating the previous path constraint. The loop on lines 23-27 is not entered, because no user input options are found. After several similar iterations, two inputs arediscovered:user=admin

pw=admin, and user≠reg

pw=reg. These correspond to alternate control flows in which the check password test succeeds.

iteration 6-7. The next iteration of the top-level loop dequeues an item that allows the check_password call to succeed (assume it selected user=reg . . . ). Once again, no failures are observed, but now the session state with user and pw set is recorded at line 13. Also, this time analyzeOutput (line 22) finds the link to the script in FIG. 1( d), and so the loop at line 23-27 adds one item to the queue, executing view.php with the current session state.

The next iteration of the top-level loop dequeues one work item. Assume that it takes the last one described above. Thus, it executes the script in FIG. 1 (d) with a session that defines user and pw but not type. Hence, it produces an execution with no errors.

iteration 8-9. The next loop iteration takes that last work item, containing a user and password pair for which the call to check.password succeeds, with the user name as ‘admin’. Once again, no failures occur, but now the session state with user, pw and type set is recorded at line 13. This time, there are no new inputs to be derived from the path constraint, since all prefixes have been covered already. Once again, parsing the output finds the link to the script in FIG. 1 (d) and adds a work item to the queue, but with a different session state (in this case, the session state also includes a value for type). The resulting execution of the script in FIG. 1( d) with the session state that includes type results in an HTML failure.

There are a few other things that happen, but at this point it should be noted that one successful and one failing execution for the script in FIG. 1( d) has been observed. This will discuss in the section “Fault Localization Example” how this information will be used for fault localization.

Fault Localization

In this section, reviewed first is the Tarantula fault localization technique. Next an alternative technique is presented that is based on the output mapping and positional information obtained from an oracle. Finally, presented is a technique that combines the former with the latter.

Tarantula

Jones et al. [11, 12] presented Tarantula, a fault localization technique that associates with each statement a suspiciousness rating that indicates the likelihood that it contributes to a failure. Note line numbers are used to identify statements, because that enables us to present the different fault localization techniques in a uniform manner. The suspiciousness rating S_(tar)(l) for a statement that occurs at line³ l is a number between 0 and 1 that is defined as follows:

$S_{{tar}{(l)}} = \frac{{{Failed}(l)}{TotalFailed}}{{{{Passed}(l)}/{TotalPassed}} + {{{Failed}(l)}/{TotalFailed}}}$

where Passed(l) is the number of passing executions that execute statement l, Failed(l) is the number of failing executions that execute statement l, TotalPassed is the total number of passing test cases, and TotalFailed is the total number of failing test cases. After suspiciousness ratings have been computed, each of the executed statements is assigned a rank, in order of decreasing suspiciousness. Ranks do not need to be unique: The rank of a statement l reflects the maximum number of statements that would have to be examined if statements are examined in order of decreasing suspiciousness, and if l were the last statement of that particular suspiciousness level chosen for examination.

Jones and Harrold [11] conducted a detailed empirical evaluation in which they apply Tarantula to faulty versions of the Siemens suite [10], and compare its effectiveness to that of several other fault localization techniques (see the section “Related Work”). The Siemens suite consists of several versions of small C programs into which faults have been seeded artificially. Since the location of these faults is given, one can evaluate the effectiveness of a fault localization technique by measuring its ability to identify these faults. In the fault localization literature, this is customarily done by reporting the percentage of the program that needs to be examined by the programmer, assuming statements are inspected in decreasing order of suspiciousness [1, 5, 11, 18].

Specifically, Jones and Harrold compute for each failing test run a score (in the range of 0%-100%) that indicates the percentage of the application's executable statements that the programmer need not examine in order to find the fault. This score is computed by determining a set of examined statements that initially contains only the statement(s) at rank 1. Then, iteratively, statements at the next higher rank are added to this set until at least one of the faulty statements is included. The score is now computed by dividing the number of statements in the set by the total number of executed statements. Using this approach, Jones and Harrold found that 13.9% of the failing test runs were scored in the 99-100% range, meaning that for this percentage of the failing tests, the programmer needs to examine less than 1% of the program's executed statements to find the fault. They also report that for an additional 41.8% of the failing tests, the programmer needs to inspect less than 10% of the executed statements.

Fault Localization using the Output Mapping

An oracle that determines whether or not a failure occurs can often provide precise information about which parts of the output are associated with that failure. For instance, an HTML validator will typically report the location of malformed HTML. Such information can be used as a heuristic to localize faults in the program, provided that it can be determine which portions of the program produced which portions of the output. The basic idea is that the code that produced the erroneous output is a good place to start looking for the causative fault. This is formalized as follows. Assume the following two functions:

-   -   O_(n)(f) returns output line numbers reported by the oracle O         for failure f, and     -   _(n)(o) returns the set of program parts of the source program         responsible for output line o

Given these two functions, a suspiciousness rating S_(map)(l) of the statement at line l for failure f is defined as follows:

${S_{map}(l)} = \left\{ \begin{matrix} 1 & {{{if}\mspace{14mu} l} \in {\bigcup\limits_{o \in {O_{n}{(f)}}}{P_{n}(o)}}} \\ 0 & {otherwise} \end{matrix} \right.$

Note that this is a “binary” rating: program parts are either highly suspicious, or not suspicious at all.

Combined Technique

The algorithm presented in the section “Tarantula” localizes failures based on how often statements are executed in failing and passing executions. However, in the web applications domain, a significant number of lines are executed in both cases, or only in failing executions. Thus, the fault localization technique presented in the section “Fault Localization using the Output Mapping” can be used to enhance the Tarantula results by giving a higher rank to statements that are blamed by both Tarantula and the mapping technique. More formally, a new suspiciousness rating S_(comb)(l) for the statement at line l is defined as follows:

${S_{comb}(l)} = \left\{ \begin{matrix} 1.1 & {{{if}\mspace{14mu}{S_{map}(l)}} = {{1\bigwedge{S_{tar}(l)}} > 0.5}} \\ {S_{tar}(S)} & {otherwise} \end{matrix} \right.$

Informally, given the suspiciousness rating 1.1 to any statement that is identified as highly suspicious by the oracle, and for which Tarantula indicates that the given line is positively correlated with the fault (indicated by the fact that Tarantula's suspiciousness rating is greater than 0.5).

Generating Inputs for Tarantula

As discussed previously, Tarantula computes suspiciousness ratings using a formula that considers how many times a statement is executed by passing and failing executions. But which passing executions and failing executions should be supplied as inputs to Tarantula?

To answer this question, assume that the algorithm of the section “Concolic Execution in the Present of Interactive User Input” has exposed a number of failing executions. This set can be partitioned into subsets that pertain to the same failure. Here, two failures are assumed to be “equivalent” (i.e., due to the same fault) if the oracle produces the same message for them, and if the same program constructs are correlated with these messages according to the output mapping. In the section “Evaluation”, separate fault localization are conducted for experiments for each subset of equivalent failing executions.

This leaves the question of what set of passing executions should be supplied to Tarantula as inputs along with these failing executions. Currently two options are considered:

1. Supply all passing executions that were identified by the algorithm of the section “Concolic Execution in the Present of Interactive User Input.”

2. Supply a randomly selected subset of 10% of the passing tests that were identified by the algorithm of the section “Concolic Execution in the Present of Interactive User Input”.

Note that the above strategies can be applied to both the Tarantula and the combined algorithms.

EXAMPLE

As described in the section “Example Algorithm”, the test input generation algorithm produced two runs of the script in FIG. 1( d): one that exposed an HTML error and one that did not. FIG. 5 shows the suspiciousness ratings S_(tar)(l), S_(map)(l), and S_(comb)(l) that are computed for each line l in the PHP script in FIG. 1( d), according to the three fault localization techniques under consideration. The columns of the table show, for each line l, when it is executed (in the passing run, in the failing run, or in both runs), and the suspiciousness ratings S_(tar)(l), S_(map)(l), and S_(comb)(l).

To understand how the Tarantula ratings are computed, consider statements that are only executed in the passing run. Such statements obtain a suspiciousness rating of 0/(1+0)=0.0. By similar reasoning, statements that are only executed in the failing run obtain a suspiciousness rating of 1/(0+1)=1.0, and statements that are executed in both cases obtain a suspiciousness rating of 1/(1+1)=0.5.

The suspiciousness ratings computed by the mapping based technique can be understood by examining the output of the validator in FIG. 2( c), along with the HTML in FIG. 2( a) and the mapping from lines of HTML to the lines of PHP that produced them in FIG. 2( b). The validator says the error is in line 5 or 6 of the output, and those were produced by lines 21 and 27 in the script of FIG. 1( d). Consequently, the suspiciousness ratings for lines 21 and 27 is 1.0, and all other lines are rated 0.0 by the mapping-based technique.

The suspiciousness ratings for the combined technique follow directly from its definition in the section entitled “Combined Technique”.

As can be seen from the table, the Tarantula technique identifies lines 12 and 21 as the most suspicious ones, and the output mapping based technique identifies lines 21 and 27 as such. In other words, each of these fault localization techniques—when used in isolation—reports one nonfaulty statement as being highly suspicious. However, the combined technique correctly identifies only line 21 as the faulty statement.

Example Flow Diagrams

FIGS. 4-6 are example flows of a computer-implemented method for localizing faults in an application according to the present invention.

Turning now to FIG. 4, shown is a computer-implemented flow of an embodiment for prioritizing code fragments based on the use of a software oracle and on a correlation between the executed code fragments and the output they produce. The term “oracle” as used herein is a software algorithm that evaluates execution characteristics of code fragments.

In FIG. 4, the process begins at step 402 and immediately proceeds to step 404, where at least a portion of the code fragments that comprise the application are executed. Next, in step 406, a correlation is performed between the executed code fragments and execution characteristics that these code fragments exhibited on execution. In step 408, a determination with an oracle is performed. The oracle produces an evaluation associated with at least one part of the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments. In step 410, the code fragments are prioritized in the application based on the evaluation produced by the oracle, and based on the correlation between the executed code fragments and the execution characteristics exhibited by those code fragments and the process ends at step 412. In one embodiment, the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is an output of the application, and the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to errors in at least one part of this output. The execution characteristics in another embodiment is a creation of at least one new generated application. Still, in another embodiment, the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is a characteristic of performance of the code fragments. Further, in one embodiment, the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to errors in the generated application. And in another embodiment, the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to security vulnerabilities in the generated application.

Further, in one embodiment, the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is an output of the application, and the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to errors in at least one part of this output. The execution characteristics in another embodiment is a creation of at least one new generated application. Still, in another embodiment, the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is a characteristic of performance of the code fragments. Further, in one embodiment, the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to errors in the generated application. And in another embodiment, the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to security vulnerabilities in the generated application.

Turning now to FIG. 5, shown is a computer-implemented flow of an embodiment for generating additional user inputs based on execution information associated with path constraints and based on information from the oracle. Advantageously, the embodiment is useful in a test generation tool that generated many similar inputs when a failure-inducing input is found, in order to enhance fault localization.

In FIG. 5, the process begins at step 502 and immediately proceeds to step 504 where an initial user input is generated for the application. Next, in step 506, at least a portion of the code fragments that comprise the application is executed. In step 508, execution information is associated with the executed code fragments. Step 510, an oracle is used to provide an evaluation of at least one execution characteristics that these code fragments exhibited on execution. Code fragments in the application are prioritized based on the evaluation produced by the oracle, and based on the execution information associated with the executed code fragments in step 512. Additional inputs for the application are generated based on the code fragments that have been prioritized and based on execution information associated with the executed code fragments in step 514. And the process may continue back to step 506 until all the desired code fragments are analyzed and end in step 516.

In one embodiment, the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is an output of the application, and the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to errors in at least one part of this output. In another embodiment, execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is a characteristic of performance of the executed code fragments. Moreover, in another embodiment, the execution information associated with code fragments that have been executed consists of path constraints. In still another embodiment, the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is a creation of at least one new generated application. Further, the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to errors in the generated application. Still, further, in another embodiment, the evaluation produced by the oracle corresponds to security vulnerabilities in the generated application.

Turning now to FIG. 6, shown is a computer-implemented flow diagram of an embodiment for extending the existing idea of concolic testing to applications that interact with persistent state. Unlike the flow diagrams of FIGS. 4 and 5, no oracle is required in this flow.

In FIG. 6, the process begins at step 602 and immediately proceeds to step 604 where an initial input and persistent state for the application is generated. Next, in step 606, at least a portion of the code fragments that comprise the application is executed with the input and persistent state. Execution information is associated with the execution of the code fragments. In step 608, usage of persistent state by the executed code fragments is recorded. At least one execution characteristics is examined that these code fragments exhibited on execution, in step 610. Additional user inputs for the application are generated for the application based on the execution information associated with the fragments that have been executed, and based on the execution characteristics which have been examined, and based on the recorded persistent state in step 612, and the flow ends in step 614.

In another embodiment, the execution information associated with code fragments that have been executed consists of path constraints. In another embodiment, the examining of the execution characteristics of the executed code fragments is a creation of at least one new generated application, and where the examining of the execution characteristics involves performing a program analysis to detect security vulnerabilities in this generated application.

Implementation

The Apollo 1.0 tool [3] has been extended with the algorithm for combined concrete and symbolic execution in the presence of interactive user input and persistent session state that was presented in the section “Concolic Execution in the Presence of Interactive User Input”, and with the fault localization algorithm that was presented in the section “Fault Localization”. This section discusses some key features of the implementation.

interactive user input and session state. As was mentioned in the section “Concolic Execution in the Presence of Interactive User Input”, it is important to determine what PHP scripts the user may invoke by selecting buttons, checkboxes, etc. in the HTML output of previously executed scripts. To this end, Apollo 2.0 automatically extracts the available user options from the HTML output. Each option contains the script to execute, along with any parameters (with default value if supplied) for that script. Apollo 2.0 also analyzes recursive static HTML documents that can be called from the dynamic HTML output, i.e. Apollo 2.0 traverses hyperlinks in the generated dynamic HTML that link to other HTML documents on the same site. To avoid redundant exploration of similar executions, Apollo 2.0 perform state matching (performed implicitly in Line 26 of FIG. 3) by not adding already-explored transitions.

The use of session state allows a PHP application to store user supplied information on the server for retrieval by other scripts. The PHP interpreter has been enhanced to record when input parameters are stored in session state, to enable Apollo 2.0 to track constraints on input parameters in all scripts that use them.

web server integration. Apollo 1.0 [3] only supported the execution of PHP scripts using the PHP command line interpreter. However, dynamic web applications often depend on information supplied by a web-server, and some PHP constructs are simply ignored by the command line interpreter (e.g., header). Apollo 2.0 supports execution through the Apache web-server in addition to the stand-alone command line executor. A developer can use Apollo 2.0 to silently analyze the execution and record any failure found while manually using the subject program on an Apache server.

Evaluation

This evaluation aims to answer two questions:

-   -   Q1. What is the effect of automatically simulating user input         interaction on coverage and on the number of failures exposed?     -   Q2. How effective are the three fault localization techniques         presented in the section “Fault Localization” in practice?

Subject Programs

For the evaluation, six open-source PHP programs (from http://sourceforge.net) have been selected, for which the characteristics are shown in FIG. 8. faqforge is a tool for creating and managing documents. webchess is an online chess game.schoolmate is an PHP/MySQL solution for administering elementary, middle, and high schools. Phpsysinfo displays system information, e.g., uptime, CPU, memory, etc. timeclock is a web-based timeclock system.phpBB2 is an open source discussion forum.

Coverage/Failures Detected

Apollo was run with and without the simulation of user interaction for 10 minutes on each subject program. This time limit was chosen arbitrarily, but it allows each strategy to generate hundreds of inputs and there is no reason to program believe that the results would be much affected by a different time limit. This time budget includes all experimental tasks. Line coverage was measured, i.e., the ratio of the number of executed lines to the total number of lines with executable PHP code that was shown in FIG. 8. Furthermore, the discovered failures were classified as execution failures and HTML failures, as was discussed previously in the section “Failures in PHP Programs”.

FIG. 9 tabulates the line coverage results and observed failures on the subject programs for each of the two test input generation strategies (with simulated user interaction and without). As shown in FIG. 9, the Experimental results are for 10-minute test generation runs. The table presents results each of the No Simulated UI and the Simulated UI strategies. The % cov column lists the line coverage achieved by the generated inputs. The next three columns show the number of execution errors, HTML failures, and the total number of failures.

Although the effect varies, it is clear that the user input simulation allows Apollo to achieve better results on all subject programs. For example, on phpsysinfo the effect on coverage is marginal (55.7% vs. 55.5%) because this program is not interactive. On the other hand, for phpBB2 the effect is significant for both the coverage obtained (28.0% vs. 11.4%), and for the number of failures detected (24 instead of 4), and similarly for timeclock because these applications only performs most operations when starting in the correct state (e.g., when the user is logged in).

Localizing Faults

To answer the second research question, localized faults database was created by manually localizing up to 20 faults in 3 of the subject programs (webchess contained only 9 faults that caused the 34 failures reported previously). The three fault localization methods were applied that were discussed in the section “Fault Localization” to each failure f: (i) one implementation of Tarantula (see the section “Tarantula”), (ii) a fault localization technique that uses only the output mapping (see the section “Fault Localization using the Output Mapping”), and (iii) a fault localization technique that combines Tarantula with the output mapping (see the section “Combined Technique”). As mentioned in the section “Generating Inputs”, two sets of inputs were tried for each technique: (a) the set of executions exposing f in combination with all passing executions, and (b) the set of executions exposing f in combination with 10% of randomly selected passing executions.

The effectiveness was measured of these fault localization algorithms as the minimal number of statements that need to be inspected until all the faulty lines are detected, assuming that statements are examined in order of decreasing suspiciousness (See the section “Tarantula”). FIG. 10 tabulates the results. As shown in FIG. 10, the average percentage of the program a developer would need to inspect in order to locate the failures using different fault localization techniques. The failing/passing column indicates the method that was used to select the sets of passing and failing tests (one of All, Random) used for the fault localization. Tarantula is the fault localization technique described in the section “Tarantula” mapping is the fault localization based only on the output mapping (see the section “Fault Localization using the Output Mapping”). combined is the combined fault localization technique described in the section “Combined Technique”.

The results show that the combined technique is clearly superior to each of the Tarantula and mapping-based techniques that it builds upon. For webchess, the programmer would need to inspect 19.00% of the statements on average when Tarantula is supplied with all passing executions, 25.12% when the mapping-based technique is used, but only 6.94% using the combined technique. Using the same set of executions, the programmer needs to inspect 29.94% of schoolmate's statements using Tarantula, 15.06% using the output mapping, and only 5.09% using the combined technique. Similar results are obtained for timeclock. The use of a randomly selected subset of the passing tests yields slightly worse results for each of the techniques.

Related Work

This section discusses three categories of related work: (i) combined concrete and symbolic execution, (ii) testing of web applications, and (iii) fault localization.

DART [7] is a tool for finding combinations of input values and environment settings for C programs that trigger errors such as assertion failures, crashes and non-termination. DART combines random test generation with symbolic reasoning to keep track of constraints for executed control-flow paths. A constraint solver directs subsequent executions towards uncovered branches. CUTE [19] is a variation (called concolic testing) on the DART approach. The authors of CUTE introduce a notion of approximate pointer constraints to enable reasoning over memory graphs and handle programs that use pointer arithmetic.

Subsequent work extends the original approach of combining concrete and symbolic executions to accomplish two primary goals: 1) improving scalability [26], [28], [31], [32], [8], [35], and 2) improving execution coverage and fault detection capability through better support for pointers and arrays [4], [19], better search heuristics [8], [33], [34], or by encompassing wider domains such as database applications [30].

Godefroid [31] proposed a compositional approach to improve the scalability of DART. In this approach, summaries of lower level functions are computed dynamically when these functions are first encountered. The summaries are expressed as pre- and post-conditions of the function in terms of its inputs. Subsequent invocations of these lower level functions reuse the summary. Anand et al. [26] extend this compositional approach to be demand-driven to reduce the summary computation effort.

Exploiting the structure of the program input may improve scalability [32], [35]. Majumdar and Xu [35] abstract context free grammars that represent the program inputs to produce a symbolic grammar. This grammar reduces the number of input strings to enumerate during test generation.

Majumdar and Sen [34] describe hybrid concolic testing, interleaves random testing with bounded exhaustive symbolic exploration to achieve better coverage. Inkumsah and Xie [33] combine evolutionary testing using genetic mutations with concolic testing to produce longer sequences of test inputs. SAGE [8] also uses improved heuristics, called white-box fuzzing, to achieve higher branch coverage.

The language under consideration in this paper, PHP, is quite different from the focus of previous testing research. PHP poses several new challenges such as dynamic inclusion of files, and function definitions that are statements. Existing techniques for fault detection in PHP applications use static analysis and target security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks [40], [42], [45], [50], [51]. In particular, Minamide [45] uses static string analysis and language transducers to model PHP string operations to generate potential HTML output—represented by a context free grammar—from the web application. This method can be used to generate HTML document instances of the resulting grammar and to validate them using an existing HTML validator. As a more complete alternative, Minamide proposes a matching validation which checks for containment of the generated context free grammar against a regular subset of the HTML specification. However, this approach can only check for matching start and end tags in the HTML output, while our technique covers the entire HTML specification. Also, flow-insensitive and context-insensitive approximations in the static analysis techniques used in this method result in false positives, while our method reports only real faults.

Kie{dot over ( )}zun et al. present a dynamic tool, Ardilla [43], to create SQL and XSS attacks. Their tool uses dynamic tainting, concolic execution, and attack-candidate generation and validation. Like ours, their tool reports only real faults. However, Kie{dot over ( )}zun et al. focus on finding security faults, while we concentrate on functional correctness. Their tool builds on and extends the input-generation component of Apollo but does not address the problem of user interaction. It is an interesting area of future research to combine Apollo's user-interaction and state-matching with Ardilla's exploit-detection capabilities.

McAllister et al. [44] also tackle the problem of testing interactive web application. Their approach attempts to follow user interactions. Their method relies on pre-recorded traces of user interactions, while our approach automatically discovers allowable interactions. Moreover, their approach to handling persistent state relies on instrumenting one particular web application framework, Django. In contrast, our approach is to instrument the PHP runtime system and observe database interactions. This allows handling state of PHP applications regardless of any framework they may use.

Benedikt et al. [52] present a tool, VeriWeb, for automatically testing dynamic webpages. They use a model checker to systematically explore all paths (up to a certain bound) of user navigate in a web site. When the exploration encounters HTML forms, VeriWeb uses SmartProfiles. SmartProfiles are user-specified attribute-value pairs that are used to automatically populate forms and supply values that should be provided as inputs. Although VeriWeb can automatically fill in the forms, the human tester needs to pre-populate the user profiles with values that a user would provide. In contrast, Apollo automatically discovers input values by looking at the branch conditions along an execution path.

Dynamic analysis of string values generated by PHP web applications has been considered in a reactive mode to prevent the execution of insidious commands (intrusion prevention) and to raise an alert (intrusion detection) [41], [46], [49]. As far as we know, our work is the first attempt at proactive fault detection in PHP web applications using dynamic analysis. Finally, our work is related to implementation based (as opposed to specification based e.g., [47]) testing of web applications. These works abstract the application behavior using a) client-side information such as user requests and corresponding application responses [36], [38], or b) server-side monitoring information such as user session data [37], [48], or c) static analysis of server-side implementation logic [39]. The approaches that use client-side information or server-side monitoring information are inherently incomplete, and the quality of generated abstractions depends on the quality of the tests run.

Halfond and Orso [39] use static analysis of the server-side implementation logic to extract a web application's interface, i.e., the set of input parameters and their potential values. They implemented their technique for JavaScript. They obtained better code coverage with test cases based on the interface extracted using their technique as compared to the test cases based on the interface extracted using a conventional web crawler. However, the coverage may depend on the choices made by the test generator to combine parameter values—an exhaustive combination of values may be needed to maximize code coverage. In contrast, our work uses dynamic analysis of server side implementation logic for fault detection and minimizes the number of inputs needed to maximize the coverage. Furthermore, we include results on fault detection capabilities of our technique.

Early work on fault localization relied on the use of program slicing [21]. Lyle and Weiser [16] introduce program dicing, a method for combining the information of different program slices. The basic idea is that, when a program computes a correct value for variable x and an incorrect value for variable y, the fault is likely to be found in statements that are in the slice w.r.t.y, but not in the slice w.r.t.x. Variations on this idea technique were later explored by Pan and Spafford [17], and by Agrawal et al. [2].

In the spirit of this early work, Renieris and Reiss [18] use set-union and set-intersection methods for fault localization, so that they compare with their nearest neighbor fault localization technique (discussed below). The set-union technique computes the union of all statements executed by passing test cases and subtracts these from the set of statements executed by a failing test case. The resulting set contains the suspicious statements that the programmer should explore first. In the event that this report does not contain the faulty statement, Renieris and Reiss propose an SDGbased ranking technique in which additional statements are considered based on their distance to previously reported statements along edges in a System Dependence Graph [9]. The set-intersection technique identifies statements that are executed by all passing test cases, but not by the failing test case, and attempts to address errors of omission, where the failing test case neglects to execute a statement.

The nearest neighbors fault localization technique by Renieris and Reiss [18] assumes the existence of a failing test case and many passing test cases. The technique selects the passing test case whose execution spectrum most closely resembles that of the failing test case according to one of two distance criteria, and reports the set of statements that are executed by the failing test case but not by the selected passing test case. Note One similarity measure defines the distance between two test cases as the cardinality of the symmetric set difference between the statements that they cover. The other measure considers the differences in the relative execution frequencies. In the event that the report does not contain the faulty statement, Renieris and Reiss use the SDG-based ranking technique mentioned above to identify additional statements that should be explored next. Nearest Neighbor was evaluated on the Siemens suite [10], a collection of small C programs for which faulty versions and a large number of test cases are available, and was found to be superior to the set-union and set-intersection techniques.

Cleve and Zeller [5, 25] present a fault-localization technique based on Delta Debugging [24], a binary search and minimization technique. Delta debugging is first employed to identify the variables responsible for a failure, by selectively introducing values that occur in the program state of a failing run into the state obtained during a passing run, and observing whether or not the failure reoccurs. Then, delta debugging is applied again in order to identify cause transitions, i.e., points in the program where one variable ceases to be the cause for a failure, and where another variable starts being the origin of that failure. Cleve and Zeller report finding a real failure in GCC using the technique, and also evaluate their work on the Siemens suite.

Dallmeier et al. [6] present a fault localization technique in which differences between method call sequences that occur in passing and failing executions are used to identify suspicious statements. They evaluate the technique on buggy versions of the NanoXML Java application.

Two recent papers by Jones and Harrold [11] and by Abreu et al. [1] present empirical evaluations of several fault localization techniques, including several of the techniques discussed above, using the Siemens suite. Yu et al. [23] evaluated the sensitivity of several of the fault localization techniques discussed above to test suite reduction. Here, the goal was to determine to what extent the effectiveness of fault localization techniques was reduced as a result of applying several test-suite minimization techniques.

Other fault localization techniques analyze statistical correlations between control flow predicates and failures (see, e.g., [14, 15]), and correlations between changes made by programmers and test failures [20].

In the present invention, the Tarantula technique is applied in a different domain (open-source web applications written in PHP instead of C programs), and adapted it to take into account positional information that obtained from the PHP interpreter. Instead of using artificially seeded faults such as the ones in the Siemens suite, real faults are studied that were exposed by our Apollo 2.0 tool. Moreover, the present invention does not use an existing test suite but rely on Apollo 2.0 to generate a large number of (passing and failing) test cases instead.

Conclusions

The present invention provides a method and system for failure detection and fault localization that leverages concolic execution [4, 7,8, 19, 22] and the Tarantula algorithm [11, 12] to automatically find and localize failures in PHP web applications. The present invention adapts concolic execution to the domain of web applications by performing dynamic simulation of user interaction in different environment states. Unlike previous fault localization methods, ours does not require a test-suite with passing and failing test cases to be available up front. An output mapping is used between PHP statements and the output they produce in combination with positional information about HTML errors obtained from the oracle to improve on Tarantula's fault localization.

The technique is implemented in Apollo 2.0. In experiments on 6 open-source PHP applications, discovered is our new automatic method for simulating user input significantly improved line coverage and the number of failures found. Discovered also was that a fault localization technique that combines Tarantula with information retrieved from the output mapping is significantly more precise than either Tarantula or the output mappings alone.

The main topic for future work is to explore the use of concolic execution to generate passing test cases that are highly similar to failing test cases, to further improve the effectiveness of Tarantula.

Non-Limiting Hardware Embodiments

Overall, the present invention can be realized in hardware or a combination of hardware and software. The processing system, according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention can be realized in a centralized fashion in one computer system, or in a distributed fashion where different elements are spread across several interconnected computer systems and image acquisition sub-systems. Any kind of computer system—or other apparatus adapted for carrying out the methods described herein—is suited. A typical combination of hardware and software is a general-purpose computer system with a computer program that, when loaded and executed, controls the computer system such that it carries out the methods described herein.

An embodiment of the processing portion of the present invention can also be embedded in a computer program product, which comprises all the features enabling the implementation of the methods described herein, and which—when loaded in a computer system—is able to carry out these methods. Computer program means or computer programs in the present context mean any expression, in any language, code or notation, of a set of instructions intended to cause a system having an information processing capability to perform a particular function either directly or after either or both of the following a) conversion to another language, code or, notation; and b) reproduction in a different material form.

A computer system may include, inter alia, one or more computers and at least a computer readable medium, allowing a computer system to read data, instructions, messages or message packets, and other computer readable information from the computer readable medium. The computer readable medium may include non-volatile memory, such as ROM, flash memory, disk drive memory, CD-ROM, and other permanent storage. Additionally, a computer readable medium may include, for example, volatile storage such as RAM, buffers, cache memory, and network circuits 1112 connected to network 1138. Furthermore, the computer readable medium may comprise computer readable information in a transitory state medium such as a network link and/or a network interface, including a wired network or a wireless network, that allow a computer system to read such computer readable information.

An example of a computer system 1100 is shown in FIG. 11. The computer system 1100 includes one or more processors, such as processor 1104. The processor 1104 is connected to a communication infrastructure 1102 such as a communications bus, crossover bar, or network. Various software embodiments are described in terms of this exemplary computer system. After reading this description, it will become apparent to a person of ordinary skill in the relevant art(s) how to implement the invention using other computer systems and/or computer architectures.

Computer system 1100 includes a display interface 1110 that forwards graphics, text, and other data from the communication infrastructure 1102 (or from a frame buffer not shown) for display on the display unit 1120. Computer system 1100 also includes a main memory 1106, preferably random access memory (RAM), and optionally includes a secondary memory 1112. The secondary memory 1108 includes, for example, a hard disk drive 1116 and/or a removable storage drive 1118, representing a floppy disk drive, a magnetic tape drive, an optical disk drive, etc. The removable storage drive 1116 reads from and/or writes to a removable storage unit 1118 in a manner well known to those having ordinary skill in the art. Removable storage unit 1118, represents a floppy disk, magnetic tape, optical disk, etc. which is read by and written to by removable storage drive 1116. As will be appreciated, the removable storage unit 1118 includes a computer usable storage medium having stored therein computer software and/or data.

In alternative embodiments, the secondary memory 1112 includes other similar means for allowing computer programs or other instructions to be loaded into computer system 1100. Such means include, for example, a removable storage unit 1118 and an interface 1108. Examples of such include a program cartridge and cartridge interface (such as that found in video game devices), a removable memory chip (such as an EPROM, or PROM) and associated socket, and other removable storage units 1116 and interfaces 1108 which allow software and data to be transferred from the removable storage unit 1118 to computer system 1100.

Although specific embodiments of the invention have been disclosed, those having ordinary skill in the art will understand that changes can be made to the specific embodiments without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. The scope of the invention is not to be restricted, therefore, to the specific embodiments. Furthermore, it is intended that the appended claims cover any and all such applications, modifications, and embodiments within the scope of the present invention.

References

Each of the following fifty-two references are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety.

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What is claimed is:
 1. A computer-implemented method for analyzing an application comprising a plurality of code fragments, and where the application requires user input and interacts with persistent state, the computer-implemented method comprising: generating an initial input and persistent state of an environment in which at least a portion of the code fragments are executing, wherein the persistent state is a configuration of information in the environment that outlives an execution of the application; executing the at least a portion of the code fragments that comprise the application with the initial input starting from the persistent state and associating execution information with the code fragments that have been executed; recording usage of persistent state by the code fragments that have been executed; examining at least one execution characteristics that these code fragments exhibited on execution; and generating additional user inputs for the application based on the execution information associated with the fragments that have been executed, and based on the execution characteristics which have been examined, and the usage of persistent state that has been recorded.
 2. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the execution information associated with code fragments that have been executed consists of path constraints.
 3. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the execution characteristics of the code fragments that have been executed is an output of the application, and an evaluation produced by an oracle corresponds to errors in at least one part of this output.
 4. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the execution characteristics that the code fragments exhibited on execution is a creation of at least one new generated application.
 5. The computer implemented method of claim 4, wherein the examining of the execution characteristics involves performing a program analysis to detect security vulnerabilities in this generated application.
 6. The computer implemented method of claim 4, wherein the examining of the execution characteristics involves performing a program analysis to detect errors in this generated application.
 7. The computer implemented method of claim 1, wherein the execution characteristics that the code fragments exhibited on execution is a characteristic of performance of the code fragments that have been executed.
 8. A computer program product for analyzing an application comprising a plurality of code fragments, the computer program product comprising: a storage medium readable by a computer system, the storage medium storing software programming instructions capable of performing with a processor programming code to carry out: generating an initial input and persistent state of an environment in which at least a portion of the code fragments are executing, wherein the persistent state is a configuration of information in the environment that outlives an execution of the application; executing the at least a portion of the code fragments that comprise the application with the initial input starting from the persistent state and associating execution information with the code fragments that have been executed; recording usage of persistent state by the code fragments that have been executed; examining at least one execution characteristics that these code fragments exhibited on execution; and generating additional user inputs for the application based on the execution information associated with the fragments that have been executed, and based on the execution characteristics which have been examined, and the usage of persistent state that has been recorded.
 9. The computer program product of claim 8, wherein the execution information associated with code fragments that have been executed consists of path constraints.
 10. The computer program product of claim 8, wherein the execution characteristics of the code fragments that have been executed is an output of the application, and an evaluation produced by an oracle corresponds to errors in at least one part of this output.
 11. The computer program product of claim 8, wherein the execution characteristics that the code fragments exhibited on execution is a creation of at least one new generated application.
 12. The computer program product of claim 11, wherein the examining of the execution characteristics involves performing a program analysis to detect security vulnerabilities in this generated application.
 13. The computer program product of claim 11, wherein the examining of the execution characteristics involves performing a program analysis to detect errors in this generated application.
 14. The computer program product of claim 8, wherein the execution characteristics that the code fragments exhibited on execution is a characteristic of performance of the code fragments that have been executed.
 15. A system for analyzing an application comprising a plurality of code fragments, the system comprising: a computer processor, a monitor, and an input device; a suitable storage medium for storing data and accessible by the computer processor; and an initial input is generated and persistent state of an environment in which at least a portion of the code fragments are executing, wherein the persistent state is a configuration of information in the environment that outlives an execution of the application; an execution unit for executing the at least a portion of the code fragments that comprise the application with the input starting from the persistent state and associating execution information with the code fragments that have been executed; a recording unit for usage of persistent state by the code fragments that have been executed; and additional user inputs generated for the application based on the execution information associated with the fragments that have been executed, and based on examining at least one execution characteristics that these code fragments exhibited on execution, and the usage of persistent state that has been recorded.
 16. The system of claim 15, wherein the execution information associated with code fragments that have been executed consists of path constraints.
 17. The system of claim 15, wherein the execution characteristics of the code fragments that have been executed is an output of the application, and an evaluation produced by an oracle corresponds to errors in at least one part of this output.
 18. The system of claim 15, wherein the execution characteristics that the code fragments exhibited on execution is a creation of at least one new generated application.
 19. The system of claim 18, wherein the examining of the execution characteristics involves performing a program analysis to detect security vulnerabilities in this generated application.
 20. The system of claim 18, wherein the examining of the execution characteristics involves performing a program analysis to detect errors in this generated application. 